Thursday 16 August 2012 15.30 EDT
First published on Thursday 16 August 2012 15.30 EDT

Well, I was wrong, not for the first time and doubtless not for the last. Before the Olympics began I wrote a sour column in the grumpy old men's weekly (aka the Spectator), predicting doom and gloom. Tenuous excuses might be made for my glumness. One may still have reservations about aspects of the Games, and one may wonder whether our elation would have been quite the same if Great Britain had won nine gold medals instead of 29.

But I quite failed to foresee the welling up of warmth and good-fellowship throughout the country, or the union flags everywhere, or the friendliness which all foreign visitors to London say they encountered from the army of volunteers and the real army. Then I thought harder. Could there be one simple reason we loved that fortnight so much? Perhaps there is, and summed up succinctly: it wasn't football.

We are now obliged to return from the "Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not" of Shakespeare's words invoked at both opening and closing ceremonies to that pandemic and apparently incurable social disease known as Association Football. We return from the loyalty and fair play of our cyclists, rowers and runners to that vast carnival of cheating, brutality and avarice known as the Premier League. We return from one vision of our country, personified by the decency and charm of Brad and Jessica, Laura and Mo, to that other isle, full of the noises made by John Terry, Wayne Rooney and Joey Barton.

Not the least of the things that make the Olympics so exciting is the fact they only take place every four years. By ghastly contrast, football is omnipresent, omnivorous, omnipotent and interminable. It used to be known as our winter game; it now exactly matches the English winter in Byron's sardonic definition, "ending in July / To recommence in August". The European tournament seems only the other day but, in case you hadn't noticed, the Premier League season begins .

At the Olympics we saw again and again not only great athletic feats, but great sportsmanship. A few competitors were ejected after failing drug tests, and there was the deplorable (if farcical) sight of badminton players deliberately hitting the shuttlecock into the net because they didn't want to win. Otherwise, while almost all the Olympians played to win, they played fair.

So they do in other sports. During the PGA tournament which Rory McIlroy has just majestically won, several players penalised themselves for infractions – grounding the club, or hitting the ball twice – which no official had noticed. And you will sometimes see a snooker player stand up and say that he's fractionally touched the ball while addressing it.

Has any Premier League player ever got up off the ground and told the referee that he hadn't been fouled? Don't be silly. Professional soccer is now epitomised by the contemptible form of dishonesty known as diving. In game after game a player keels over like a felled tree on the slightest contact with a defender. This is condemned by the FA and Fifa, but they could stop it overnight if they wanted.

Racism may not be quite as prevalent in football as it was a few years back, when Leeds fans had a merry ditty rhyming another word with "trigger", and Arsenal fans greeted their neighbours from Spurs with antisemitic chants I try to suppress from my memory. But an emetic stench still regularly emerges from the pitch itself, as with the banning of Luis Suárez and the Terry case. To be sure, Terry was acquitted, on the grounds that repeating the phrase "fucking black cunt" is regarded as harmless banter among footballers.

Likewise, a group of teammates "roasting" young girls is all part of unwinding after a match. AJP Taylor said of this "game of eleven men against eleven" codified in a London pub in 1863 that "By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished". Today the "mark of England" sometimes looks like a game owned by crooks and despots and played by racists and rapists.

Behind our Olympians are backroom boffins of superb calibre. The papers have been shouting "Sir Brad" and "Sir Mo", but the very highest honours are first of all due to David Brailsford, the Diaghilev of British cycling. Give the man a peerage, or better still make him chancellor. But if Brailsford is an emblematic figure of Olympic sport, the emblematic figure of the Premier League is the football agent, a type ranking morally somewhere between child molester and war criminal.

Few of our grotesquely overpaid and overindulged footballers have any sense of loyalty at all to club, let alone country, whereas the Olympics have burnished anew the tainted name of patriotism. Multiculti lefties can applaud our rainbow team, but surely the crustiest of old colonels must have shed a tear in his pink gin when he heard Farah say how proud he was to put on his Great Britain vest: "Look mate, this is my country."

This is written by someone who has supported Arsenal since Jack Kelsey was in goal (with a heavy heart of late), who can remember the wonderful Real Madrid of Puskás and di Stéfano on flickering black and white television, whose life was brightened by Pele's Brazilians, and who can still thrill at the sight of Lionel Messi. But if domestic professional football were outlawed by parliament for a year, mightn't we feel rather better at the end of it?